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In a lonely wooded place
Willapa Bay didn’t always garner so much attention, and many of
its residentsÊhuman and animal bothÊembraced the quiet life.
For generations, Native Americans gathered shellfish, caught
salmon, and built sheltered winter villages on the shores of
Willapa, pronounced “WIL-uh-puh.” The name comes from the Indian
Kwalhioqua, or “in a lonely wooded place.”
That description still fit the bay in November 1805, when Corps
of Discovery explorer Captain William Clark, scouting the “low
pondey countrey” north of the Columbia, missed it entirely.
Fifty years later, just after the start of California’s gold
rush, early white settlers found treasure of their own in Willapa:
oysters. Towns such as Oysterville and the now-defunct Diamond
CityÊnamed for a bleached mountain of shells piled at the northern
tip of Long Island that glistened when the sun pierced the cloud
coverÊsprang up at mid-century to ship oysters by the hundreds of
millions to San Francisco. The salmon canneries came too, spawning
more villages, and the bay buzzed with commerce.
But in the 19th century, Willapa Bay again became a lonelier
place. The native Olympia oysters and salmon runs dwindled. Many
people left, and some of their towns have long since rotted into
the woods. Oystermen spared their livelihoods by importing large
Pacific oysters, which to this day they farm like a crop, as their
neighbors grow cranberries and timber on Willapa’s sparsely
developed shores.
Oyster growers of the late 1800s may have unwittingly imported
an unseen menace that would haunt their great-grandchildren:
Spartina. For generations, the new plants were mere tufts on
the bay’s 47,000 acres of tidal flats. Over time, however, the
grass quietly adapted to an environment with no natural predators.
By last summer, Spartina had infested 12,000 acres and was
expanding 20 percent a year. It already had pushed shorebirds off
some of their best foraging grounds and was poised to elbow out
oyster growers.
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 Willapa Bay, the largest estuary between San Francisco and Puget Sound,
boasts one of the least-spoiled environments and the healthiest salmon
runs south of Canada, produces one in every four oysters farmed in the
United States, and is a favorite pit stop for tens of thousands of
migratory birds. And it’s in trouble.
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